3 ms·

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez th

by somat 3mo ago

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much. The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.

vidarh 3mo ago
The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all. That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were. In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
- dd8601fn 3mo ago
  Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else. At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple. Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
  - thijson 3mo ago
    I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.
  - vidarh 3mo ago
    It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)
    - anthk 3mo ago
      In Spain and Portugal the Mac was the printed press and graphic design platform. Everything for people who truly knew what CMYK and "offset printing" meant. Amiga were for TV studios and odd demoscene people and maybe raster artwork. PC's were for "real work" (even under Windows 95 days). Boring offices with Microsoft Office and custom software, which literally had millions of software for it, from custom Borland ones to Visual Basic 5/6. Well, that and DOS compability and DOS and Windows games. In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT. In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.
  - anthk 3mo ago
    Mac was the platform for journalists and printed press audio and media producers in Spain. Outside of that niche... good luck.
- atomic_cowprod 3mo ago
  The 80's Mac were also two other things that made them less desirable for home users: they were seen as very slow (compared to "contemporary" home computers of the time - "instant-on" Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and DOS machines), and they were monochrome. No colour = terrible for gaming.
spacedcowboy 3mo ago
In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ? What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.
- doener 3mo ago
  > but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.
  - jorisw 3mo ago
    Probably Windows NT rather, which turned into Windows 2000 (and then XP)
  - mmustapic 3mo ago
    No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.
    - tialaramex 3mo ago
      There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga. One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.
phire 3mo ago
The first 386 PC didn't arrive until September 1986. It wasn't until like 1991 that sales of 386/486 PCs went above 50%. Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best. DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.
jjav 3mo ago
> The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!
brazzy 3mo ago
I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine. Different times...
- smallstepforman 3mo ago
  You also got a battery backed clock with the 512kb memory upgrade :)
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
kamma4434 3mo ago
> The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much. I remember the Mac emulator running Mac software faster than a classic Mac. Too bad the drive was not compatible so you had to convert disks for them to be readable.

by somat 3mo ago

vidarh 3mo ago

The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all. That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were. In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.

dd8601fn 3mo ago
Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else. At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple. Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
- thijson 3mo ago
  I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.
- vidarh 3mo ago
  It's fascinating just how balkanised computing was at that point. Growing up in Norway I never saw a non-Mac Apple computer in person. Commodore was dominant, with Atari, Spectrum, Amstrad as runners up. Some schools had the homegrown Tiki (early versions were Z-80, then with an 8088 CPU board), but that was itself a response to a survey finding 75 different models of computers in Norwegian schools as of 1982 leading to a government standard (that was largely outdated before it was published; demanding CP/M compatibility)
  - anthk 3mo ago
    In Spain and Portugal the Mac was the printed press and graphic design platform. Everything for people who truly knew what CMYK and "offset printing" meant. Amiga were for TV studios and odd demoscene people and maybe raster artwork. PC's were for "real work" (even under Windows 95 days). Boring offices with Microsoft Office and custom software, which literally had millions of software for it, from custom Borland ones to Visual Basic 5/6. Well, that and DOS compability and DOS and Windows games. In late 90's Amigas were still used in TV studios but they were replaced by NT or Mac machines. And, well, PowerPC Macs where still the serious platform to run Photoshop and the rest of graphic suites (and DTP's) until everyone switched to Windows 2000 and NT, altough a G4 Mac was unbeatable for audio and video producing (it curb-stomped Pentium 3's like nothing) until Intel released Pentium 4's with SSE2's and 2000 with SP4 or XP with SP2 were good enough with either a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 7500 series and up.
pjmlp 3mo ago
Yes, the Mac was hardly anywhere in Europe until after the reverse acquisition from NeXT. In Portugal there was only an importer in Lisbon for the whole country, at the university campus, only a single lab had a couple of LCs, as did some secretaries on the CS department and that was it.
- anthk 3mo ago
  Mac was the platform for journalists and printed press audio and media producers in Spain. Outside of that niche... good luck.
atomic_cowprod 3mo ago
The 80's Mac were also two other things that made them less desirable for home users: they were seen as very slow (compared to "contemporary" home computers of the time - "instant-on" Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, and DOS machines), and they were monochrome. No colour = terrible for gaming.

spacedcowboy 3mo ago

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga could do, ceding the VFX market to the Amiga with its genlock. The Amiga’s graphics and sound were both better than the ST, but games were comparable on both, and did I mention the ST was cheaper ? What the ST could do (and well) were things like DTP (Calamus, Calligrapher,…) and MIDI (there are still rare sightings of ST’s in audio studios, 20 years ago they were ubiquitous). Those two gave it legs to run for far longer than you might expect, because Macs were outrageously expensive at the time.

doener 3mo ago
> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.
- jorisw 3mo ago
  Probably Windows NT rather, which turned into Windows 2000 (and then XP)
- mmustapic 3mo ago
  No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.
  - tialaramex 3mo ago
    There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga. One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.

phire 3mo ago

The first 386 PC didn't arrive until September 1986. It wasn't until like 1991 that sales of 386/486 PCs went above 50%. Most PCs in the wild were still 8088s or 286es at best. DOS just couldn't really take advantage of a 386, so for most people, that 386 wasn't exactly useful until windows 3.0 was released in 1990. DOS extenders didn't really become mainstream until about the same time.

jjav 3mo ago

> The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K Mid 80s my first computer had 16K and that was a lot. Later upgraded to 64K which was mind blowingly huge, couldn't imagine how to use so much RAM!

brazzy 3mo ago

I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine. Different times...

smallstepforman 3mo ago
You also got a battery backed clock with the 512kb memory upgrade :)

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

kamma4434 3mo ago

> The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much. I remember the Mac emulator running Mac software faster than a classic Mac. Too bad the drive was not compatible so you had to convert disks for them to be readable.